Mengele Legend Proved Wrong

SAO PAULO — Much of the world pictured Josef Mengele in Paraguay, living in the jungle with machine guns and savage dogs and certainly hatching some mad plot for power.

The myths and the legend, the films and the rumors surrounding the last great Nazi war criminal grew with the years into a kind of accepted scenario: the ``Angel of Death`` who murdered 400,000 death camp inmates and conducted bizarre pseudomedical experiments on others was one step ahead of his hunters, locked in an exotic South American chase.

There were repeated sightings, repeated extradition appeals. From time to time bodies were dug up and examined. A $3.4 million reward added glitter to the picture.

But the eventual truth was pitifully plain. Mengele`s remains were officially identified Friday by a team of forensic experts.

Mengele had been in Brazil, not Paraguay. He lived his final years on farms, playing with children and begging his housemaid to sit with him and watch television soap operas. She told authorities she was in love with Mengele, but she wed another man when he refused to marry her.

Mengele died a sick and rather lonely old man, far from the Israeli, American and West German government agents that sought him. And, from writings he left behind and conversations, apparently unrepentant.

``He always said he had never done any harm,`` said Hungarian-born Gitta Stammer, who sheltered Mengele almost from his arrival in Brazil. ``But he went cold at the mention of Jews.``

According to Stammer`s police testimony, she and her husband, Geza, took in Mengele -- who was introduced to them as ``Swiss citizen Peter Hochbichlet`` -- in 1961.

They were living on a 50-acre farm 180 miles outside Sao Paulo. Most of their friends were European immigrants, and it was one of the community, Austrian Wolfgang Gerhard, who presented ``Hochbichlet`` as ``a widower, a very solitary man with problems who needs people,`` Gitta Stammer said.

She said the couple became suspicious, confronted Mengele with his real identity and asked him to leave when he admitted the truth. But Mengele asked for time. Gerhard made veiled threats against the Stammer children and the situation dragged on until 1974, she said.

Federal police chief Someu Tuma said he doubted this testimony: ``Thirteen years would be a long time to keep anyone under the same roof just on the basis of threats.``

A former farm employee told police Gitta Stammer was ``very affectionate`` with her lodger, saying he thought the two might have been having an affair.

Stammer denied this; the only public indication was that her husband was frequently away from home. He was away when Brazilian police, tipped off by West German authorities, exhumed the body later identified as Mengele`s.

Gitta Stammer said her husband had gone to Singapore as a passenger on a merchant ship on which her son is an officer.

Gitta Stammer told police Mengele received no pay as their live-in farm manager, and in West Germany, his son Rolf Mengele told reporters the family sent only a modest allowance.

But Tuma said police suspected more money might have been involved, and that the Stammer farms might even have been bought by Mengele.

After Mengele moved out of the Stammers` home, he had a similar relationship with another European couple, Austrians Liselotte and Wolfram Bossert. They sheltered Mengele from 1974 until his 1979 drowning, saying they did so out of kindness, friendship and pity.

The Bosserts produced photographs of Mengele taking their children in his little homemade boat. He vacationed with them, and they visited frequently.

``We talked a lot about the old times, but not much about the war,`` Wolfram Bossert said.

Police seized a cassette tape of Nazi ``Zieg Heil`` chants accompanying what they believe to be a speech made by Adolf Hitler. Tuma said he suspected the Bosserts and Stammers helped Mengele partly out of ideological sympathy.

When coroners in 1979 examined an elderly drowning victim, who appeared to have suffered a stroke while swimming, they accepted his identity and sent him for burial in a small cemetery outside Sao Paulo.

Until the June 6 exhumation of his body, the ``Angel of Death`` rested peacefully, in a country graveyard with bamboo and palm trees overlooking a valley with a gentle running stream.